


Sunleth Waterscape

by Kiintsugi



Category: Final Fantasy XIII, The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:28:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22216321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiintsugi/pseuds/Kiintsugi
Summary: They say Pulse was hell without the brimstone.But Gran Pulse isn’t hell...Its dead.Lexa looked up at the floating world of Cocoon and sighed; its’s glowing surface lighting the night and protecting them from the monsters that lurked in the dark. They had made camp for the night in the Vallis Media; a valley formed through great shifts in the earth and centuries of erosion. It’s overgrown with vegetation, half buried remnants of a once great mechanical civilization poking out from the greens and pinks and blues and browns. She remembered it well – the city that once called the valley it’s home. It was beautiful.She wished she could have shown Clarke.
Relationships: Clarke Griffin & Lexa, Clarke Griffin/Lexa
Comments: 3
Kudos: 22





	Sunleth Waterscape

**Author's Note:**

> i'e been playing with the idea of a full multi chapter ffxiii au fic so i wrote a oneshot to work out how i feel about it. let me know if anyone would be interested in a full fledged story in the ffxiii universe!

They say Pulse was hell without the brimstone. 

A sprawling planet, wild and untethered from law or order, where demons ravage the land. Its uncultured, uncivilized, a game for survival that no one can win. It was a land where Fal’cie pay humans little to no mind and humans who dream only of taking Cocoon and tearing it from the sky. It’s barbaric, backwards; a primal world with unknown terrors. 

But Gran Pulse isn’t hell... 

Its dead. 

Lexa looked up at the floating world of Cocoon and sighed; its’s glowing surface lighting the night and protecting them from the monsters that lurked in the dark. They had made camp for the night in the Vallis Media; a valley formed through great shifts in the earth and centuries of erosion. It’s overgrown with vegetation, half buried remnants of a once great mechanical civilization poking out from the greens and pinks and blues and browns. She remembered it well – the city that once called the valley it’s home. It was beautiful. 

She wished she could have shown Clarke. 

“Just tell her her skin looks like Cocoonlight.” 

That was the advice Anya had given her when they arrived on Gran Pulse, but Lexa didn’t understand how it could possibly help. 

The Cocoonlight lied. A surface without it’s own light, sometimes there, sometimes not. It painted the word in a translucent coat of silver and gray against the blackness of summer skies. It muted, it cloaked, it diminished the beauty of world it illuminated to little more than stories to tell in the dark. 

There was nothing about the Cocoon that reminds Lexa of Clarke. 

She looked at her brand, the peeking eye staring back at her. It hadn’t moved in days. Maybe she had more time than she thought. Maybe the cocoonlight was playing tricks on her eyes. Maybe tonight was her last chance. 

Lexa took in a deep breath and dipped her chin in the pinpricks of starlight above, Cocoon’s super massive shell shimmering with light from the life they left behind. She never thought she would have seen in with her own eyes – the Viper’s nest. But she did see it and it wasn’t what she thought. Its people weren’t the monsters the stories told her they would be. 

On Cocoon they didn’t even have cocoonlight, or a sky for that matter. Looking up, Lexa remembered, revealed the lush greens and soft browns of Gran Pulse. Looking up felt like looking down. How could Lexa tell Clarke her skin looked like cocoonlight when she grew up in Cocoon? Cocoon was beautiful and illusive, always just out of reach. But it was also the enemy; the other side of a five-hundred-year war that left Gran Pulse on the verge of death. 

Maybe even, Lexa hated to admit, past the verge of death. Maybe there really was nothing left of Gran Pulse. 

No. She refused to believe that. 

The land was flourishing, better than she had ever seen it. And she was here; Anya was here; Lincoln and Luna and Roan and Aden. They were all here. 

But Clarke warned her, delicately at first, but more solemn and sure as time went on. How could they have made such a ruckus in their landing, gone this long, and not run into a single village, not seen any drifters or nomads or hunters. How was it that the only thing Pulse had to greet them were fiends and l’cie? 

Clarke may have been branded by Gran Pulse Fal’cie, but she was a Cocoon native; a viper – she called them growing up. She had no attachment to this place, no memories. To her Gran Pulse was a death sentence, a surefire way to get herself killed in the most brutally painful way imaginable. Funny that the Fal’cie saw her fit enough to do their bidding when she wasn’t one of them. 

_But_ , Lexa thought, _she could be._

Clarke was a mystery. Unlike the rest of Cocoon, she was hardened and serious, always looking over her shoulder and expecting the worst. She the reflexes and the mindset of Oerban hunter, and a skilled one at that. Sometimes Lexa forgot she was talking to a military trained medic, it felt too much like home. But at the same time, Clarke was uncomfortable in the Archylte Steppe, lost in the Faultwarrens, and even spent her time in the Sulyya Springs worrying about preemptive strikes by wandering Cei’th. As familiar as she seemed, as much as she felt Oerban, she was raised with vipers and she thought like them too. 

The Cocoonlight lied. It always lies. Its people lie. And Lexa wouldn’t, couldn’t, accept their words as the truth. 

Lexa’s nails bit the leather grip of her sword. _Tell Clarke her skin looks like_ _Cocoonlight_ _,_ she laughed. _How foolish._

But of course, to a woman who had never seen light of the sun reflecting off of Cocoon’s silvery surface, the cocoon was beautiful. 

She caught Clarke looking at it almost every night and Lexa wanted so badly to tell her the tales of her people under its light; stories that without her to hear, were to be lost to time. But the stories painted cocoon as the villain – all of them – and she knew that Clarke would never want to hear a tale of hero who sealed the sky demon within the cocoon. 

It was a good story – her favorite – but she and Clarke were too different. Clarke would never see Gran Pulse as anything more than hell, just like Lexa would never see Cocoon as anything more than a prison for a demon. 

Clarke was first watch tonight, and by all reasoning, Lexa should be asleep. But her mind was racing, her gaze drinking in the image of Clarke painted in pale silver drips under Cocoon’s glow as if it were a drug. 

Lexa never could tell if Clarke was looking at its beauty, its greenish scar, missing home or dreading her return. She looked upon its surface with such an enigmatic expression – one that screamed with scorn as much as it did sadness – Lexa was unsure of if she should even approach her at all. 

In the end, her feet made the decision for her. 

She slid down into the grass beside her on a small cliff side that overlooked camp. The soft, apple scented grass filling her lugs with familiarity and comfort and clashed with the nerves that had begun to bud in the pit of her stomach. 

“You shouldn’t be awake,” Clarke said. 

Lexa lifted her shoulders. “Can’t sleep.” 

Clarke hummed and pulled her knees to her chest. Her hair was down, wavy unwashed curls spilling down around her face in rolling waves of dusty gold. Lexa hated the way the night muted the color of her hair, but in return, it made her eyes sparkle like gems. And that was something she could forgive. 

“It’s so small,” Clarke said. 

“Cocoon?” 

Clarke nodded. “I guess the world is only as big as your perspective, huh?” 

Lexa smiled. “That your way of saying you were wrong?” 

“About Pulse?” 

“Gran Pulse.” 

“Gran Pulse,” Clarke agreed, smiling back. “Yeah. I was wrong. We all were.” 

_Once_ _we get to_ _Oerba_ _;_ she would say. _I’ll show you; s_ he would promise. But the longer they spent on Gran Pulse, the more Lexa began to wonder if she was wrong too. 

“I hope that isn’t true.” 

Clarke didn’t say anything, but her expression read well enough. She knew exactly what Lexa meant; she would be a fool not to. Not with the way Lexa had vehemently fought for respect and recognition. 

_I’ll show you._

Truth was, in all their time on Pulse, there had been nothing to see but fiends and fauna. What did she have to prove that Gran Pulse was a world of wonder and beauty? What did she have to prove that the people were just as afraid of Cocoon as Cocoon was of Gran Pulse? 

Not much. 

Nothing, actually. 

Clarke frowned and placed a hand on Lexa’s shoulder. "I’m sure we’ll find people soon. There’s still Oerba." 

_Once we get to_ _Oerba_ _._

Lexa shrugged off Clarke’s hand and looked up at Cocoon; letting herself drink in the fake light from the fake land. “It’s surrounded by a field of flowers, you know.” 

“Oerba?” 

“Yeah,” Lexa smiled. “Thousands of them. As far as the eye can see.” 

“It sounds beautiful.” 

Lexa swallowed back the stones damming her throat and closed her eyes. She hadn’t seen home in five hundred years but to her it felt like five weeks, not five centuries. Even if Oerba did survive – it had to – was it even the same village she remembered? Were the flowers still there? Was her home still standing? 

“It is,” she said, gritting her teeth and keeping her voice steady. It had to be. 

Clarke pulled her knees to her chest, sighed and then relaxed again; feet sliding through the grass with lazy, effortlessly graceful momentum. “I Still can’t believe you lived down here. With all this.” She gestured around her; to the water and trees, the grass and the flowers, the sky and the stars, the scarred orb of Cocoon. 

“I can’t believe you lived up there,” Lexa said, smiling something soft that Clarke quickly matched. 

“Everything on Pulse – Gran Pulse – its all so big and endless and beautiful. For the first time I finally know what it feels like to breathe fresh air, to see starlight.” Clarke flopped on her back and blew out a breath, fingers pointed to the sky. “Cocoon is even beautiful from here.” 

_So are you._

“It wasn’t before?” 

“Not like this.” 

Lexa looked up at Cocoon, thinking about the silver shimmer and the way it painted the world in gray, the way it made Clarke’s eyes shine like sapphires. 

_Just tell her_ _her_ _skin looks like_ _cocoonlight_. 

“Clarke.” 

“hn?” Clarke tilted her head toward Lexa, one eye open. 

Lexa swallowed. 

“What was it like growing up on Cocoon?” 

Clarke rolled over onto one side and propped up her chin on her hand. Her elbow dug into the soft grass and Lexa watched as she screwed into the dirt and stationed herself. “It’s… different.” She gestured with her free hand to nothing in particular. “Nothing like this.” 

“But no one lured you into some creepy dungeon and enslaved you or stole your soul.” 

“No.” Her forehead wrinkled with worry lines and confusion. 

“So,” Lexa explained. “We were wrong about Cocoon, too.” 

“You thought someone was stealing our souls?” 

“You thought Gran Pulse was hell.” 

“Fair point,” Clarke smiled. “It was… I don’t know. By Cocoon standards it wasn’t particularly interesting. Average, I guess. I went to school. Learned how to ride a bike. Got a part time job selling ice cream.” 

“But you didn’t hunt?” 

Clarke shook her head. 

“What good does selling ice cream do? Cocoon has fiends, too. I saw them.” 

“The military handles the fiends,” Clarke explained. “The rest of us just try to be happy and productive for the rest of the people Cocoon.” 

Lexa frowned. “Sounds boring.” 

Clarke lifted a shoulder. “Maybe,” she said. “But we don’t know any thing else.” 

Lexa chewed this over, her eyes falling from Clarke’s eyes to shadows on her chest, where her brand lie hidden by the dark. 

It seemed wildly unfair, even to Lexa, that Clarke and the other Cocoonians found themselves branded by Pulse Fal’cie. To do the bidding of those who saw them as monsters, and who were to them, monsters themselves. That these weak creatures who never hunted a day in their life, never stared down a behemoth or challenged an adamantoise, would be deemed appropriate vessels to face the challenge of going against their entire people. 

And yet she had been chosen – for whatever reason – to follow Lexa into the fire, to do the thing she couldn’t do alone; to do the thing none of them could do without her. 

“How’s your brand?” 

Clarke touched her chest and released a breath heavy with realization. “Not great,” she admitted. But, when was it ever? 

Lexa thought about her own brand, a mark of black and red cemented into her flesh. The eye had begun to open some while ago; a red iris peeking out from black arrows and signifying the beginning of the end. If her math was right, and if Clarke’s brand was at the same stage as her own, it wasn’t very long before they took a trip to Cei’th city. 

She looked at her forearm and pulled back her sleeve and looked at the little arrows poking out from the bunched fabric. “Mine’s not looking so hot either,” she said. 

“No time to admire the view, then. We’ll have to get moving as soon as the sun comes up if we don’t want to be late for fate.” 

In war, Anya once told her, there is no time to question it. You’re branded, you go out, you do your job, and if you’re lucky, you do it right. But the war was over, more than 500 years over. And all Clarke ever did was question her fate. For her to make jokes about it now… Lexa couldn’t quite believe it. 

“You’ve accepted it then?” 

“Crystal stasis?” Clarke asked. “Hell no. Nobody determines my fate but me.” 

Lexa smiled. 

“What?” 

She shook her head. “It’s just that… this is why you’re you, Clarke. You get shoved down a path, threatened with eternal damnation, and instead of accepting it you fight tooth and nail for something more.” 

“You don’t?” 

“I never considered that there was something more to look forward too. During the war the only thing that mattered was surviving long enough to serve Gran Pulse.” 

“Don’t you think your life should be about more than serving Pulse?” 

Lexa bit down on her cheeks and swallowed hard. 

“Because I sure as hell do. I want to see it all. Cocoon, Pulse, everything they had to offer. I want sand, real sand, between my toes and I want real snow, too. Not the kind manufactured by Fal’cie so the kids can go sledding but the kind that comes hard and fast and keeps you locked up in your house all day. I want to kill a behemoth and drive a Velocycle in Palumpolum. I want to fall in love with the world, and I want to fall in love with a person too.” Clarke gripped her chest and scowled. “And I can’t do any of that if I’m a pawn for some Fal’cie game.” 

That shimmer in her eyes: like a fire’s reflection on jewels... 

Lexa swallowed again. 

“Fuck our focus,” Clarke said. “I choose my fate. Not the Fal’cie.” 

Lexa pursed her lips and nodded. “Fuck our focus,” she agreed, and Clarke smiled that smile of hers that made the silver filter of Cocoonlight bloom to warming gold. And in that moment, Lexa realized she would anything to make Clarke’s fight a winning one. 

All at once Lexa’s arm felt as if it were burning from the inside out. She gripped her forearm, groaning with pain as she doubled over onto herself. Pressing her arm between her chest and her knees, one hand wrapped around her brand. It seared, flames licking at her nerves, and Lexa whined again when the pressure did nothing to help. 

“Lexa!” 

Lexa could feel Clarke pressing against her, she could hear her speaking to her, asking her questions, trying to ease the pain. But the pain was too much and all Lexa could do was swallow her screams and groan something unpleasant and Cei’th like. 

Maybe this was her end. 

Maybe she was becoming a monster. 

After several moments, the pain began to dull and Lexa eased her vice like grip from around her arm; her fingers numb and shaking from the force of pressure. She uncurled from around herself and looked down at her brand. The intricate burn of black arrows and a creeping red eye was gone and in its place was a patch of rough white. Her skin was rough and calloused where the brand used to sit, little white arrows fading to nothing: red eye mysteriously gone. 

Lexa raised her arm higher, casting it to the pale silver and green lights of Cocoon. "Impossible.” 

“What the hell?” 

Lexa squinted at her brand as Clarke seized her arm and began examine the strange phenomenon. 

“Is this some sort of sick joke?” 

_Was it?_

Lexa didn’t really know. 

Clarke seemed convinced it was. And then... 

“Does this mean you can’t go cei’th?” 

Lexa blinked and pressed her fingers into her brand. The skin pinkened beneath it at the pressure of her touch, but the lines remained white atop it. It looked as if it had been erased – the remnants of a graphite lines pressed into paper – and written over again. It was still there. Barely, partially – if not wholly in its own way – still there. 

“I... don’t think so,” Lexa said, dropping her arm in her lap. “I think,” she paused and swallowed back something thick and stony in her throat. “I think it means something else.” 

“Something bad?” Clarke asked. Her voice was full of worry, her tone soft and concerned and in every way as soothing as it was heavy. Clarke had that quality about her. Full and strong and heavy and jagged and soft and warm and light, all at the same time. Always. It was what she loved most about her. What made Clarke who she was. 

Lexa’s light in the dark. 

“No,” Lexa smiled, her eyes catching Clarke’s. “I don’t think it is.” 

She turned and looked at Cocoon, and she could feel Clarke’s gaze follow her to the sky. “I used to hate the night. I hated that the world was cast in Cocoonlight. That I had to see the world through recycled light. Something fake... just like Cocoon.” She paused for a moment and looked at Clarke; the way her gold hair still shimmered bright admits the silver. “I thought, “that’s when the real monsters come out. When the vipers nest lights the sky,” without ever thinking that cei’th and behemoths don’t care one way or another the time of day it is.” 

“Or that we have the same fears on Cocoon that you do on Gran Pulse,” Clarke said. 

“I wanted to protect the people I care about from the monsters. That’s why I joined the war. That’s why I went to the Fal’cie to get branded. And now I'm right back where I started, five hundred years later, pledging to myself all over again to protect the people I care about. The person I care about.” She grabbed her brand again and squeezed her forearm between her fingers. “I’m going to fight your fight, Clarke. No matter what. Because the person I care most for, in your world and mine, is you.” 

* * *


End file.
